EDA KRISEOV
A
447
drafts out.
It
was still comfortable there: there was a fire burning in the
stove and the windows facing the road still had their curtains.
The gendarme propped the picture against the sideboard and put the
sugar bowl down in front of it to keep it from slipping. Then he sat
backwards on a chair, his arms dangling over the backrest, his flat lenses
fixed on the picture. What did he see? A wooden village church with an
onion dome. It was perched on a bright green hilltop like an Easter
chicken, every leaf, every blade of grass distinct.
Just below the church stood a wooden hut straight out of Nikola
Suhaj, the gendarmes' enemy number one. There were beans and sun–
flowers in the garden and daisies along the fence; there was a draw well
nearby and a dog sitting at a doghouse, and a lot more - Mr. Blaha
couldn't get over how much there was
to
it, not even after fifty years.
It
was an honest job, the sum total of what an unknown artist had to say
about the landscape, a hymn to a scrap of forgotten land, a memorial to
times past.
He had had it done shortly after discovering who set the Sevenir
church on fire.
It
was the time when people in the Subcarpathian Ukraine were
converting back to their true faith, Orthodoxy. They no longer had any
use for the Greek Catholic churches and needed new buildings of their
own. The Agrarians promised them a church for a given number of
votes, the National Socialists an altar. By the time the elections rolled
round, a set of bells had been thrown into the bargain. There were six–
teen hundred votes in all. The
biro,
their village elder, worked out who
was to vote how, and the gendarme went from house to house collect–
ing the votes. The people were illiterate, so the gendarme punched a
hole for each voter.
The deserted Catholic churches flared up like haystacks in a field.
One day there was a fire reported down near the Romanian border.
By
the time we got there, the bells were dripping like when you spit off
a bridge. Monstrances, prayer books, hymnals - everything was going up
in smoke.
I went straight to the Orthodox priest, but I couldn't get a word
out of him. Don't ask me, he said. I don't know a thing.
Well, you're coming with us, we said. Maybe a few days at head–
quarters will help you to remember.
But it didn't, and within two days he was released for lack of evi–
dence.
Two weeks later things were kind of slow, so I said, How about a
little spin down to Sevenir, boys? and off we went.
They were just starting to drive on the right at the time, and this
fellow with a horse came up to us on the left.
